GT3: First Impressions of the Rally Racing

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Polyphony has completely redesigned the way rally cars drive and feel in GT3. Check our impressions.

By IGN Staff

It's no longer a secret that Gran Turismo 3 is one of the best looking games to come to PlayStation 2. It's absolutely gorgeous, even a monkey can see that. And while much of the press, including ourselves, has provided you with dozens of first impressions, GT3 has evolved since we first played it back at E3 in 1999. Yesterday the IGNPS2 staff had the chance to visit Sony and play totally new sections of GT3, the most noteworthy in my mind being the never-seen-before rally section. Even though we dribbled wildly over the rally section of GT2 more than a year ago, in retrospect, it's clear that GT2's rally aspects were in need of some major upgrades across the board. It only took a few really bad rally games, in addition to two incredibly great Colin McRae games to prove that. Now, don't get me wrong, it wasn't like the GT2 rally aspects were bad, but did the game really provide a great rally experience?

The answer is pretty clear. So, yesterday, we were all quite surprised at how well the rally game played. The demo level we played enabled us to play a single car and a single track, and yet that was more than enough. The car was the Subura Impreza Rally Edition and the course was Smokey Mountain. We raced against one computer-controlled car, which seemed tough to beat initially, but didn't prove to be much competition after a single race.

First off, it must be noted that being a big rally fan, I'm hard to impress. As of today, I have only played two impressive rally games, Colin McRae 1 and 2. Nothing else in my experience is worth touching. So, when I played GT3 yesterday, I expected the heavy cars, the hyperextension of the street racing feel, and lots of spinning out. Or, as David Smith said, GT2 rally racing was like racing on a trampoline. That was essentially my experience with GT2 Rally. But to my surprise, GT3 has improved drastically in this region.

I started off in second place, but managed to stick close the AI car. I foresaw upcoming turns and swung into them, letting my foot off the acceleration and staying off the brakes. My car handled the turns beautifully, sliding somewhat but then reacting to my foot on the pedal again. I slowed a touch on each of the different surfaces, gravel, grass, etc., but never felt out of the race. There are about three tough, sharp turns in the course, and only one really threw me. This turn is essentially a 180-degree left turn that's hard to predict. Still, in the end, on the second, third and fourth races I totally creamed the Peugeot 206 I raced against.

What I noticed about the way the car handled was multifold. First, the Impreza is probably not the first rally car you'll open in the game, it's probably one of the middle or later cars, and it's fast; it grips incredibly well. Knowing that, I was very impressed with the way the car handled, took grip, and also particularly by the way in which the car weighed. By that I mean when you play Colin McRae, the cars are generally light and often floaty. In GT2 the cars were heavy as logs and drove just the same. Here, the Impreza was moderately heavy, and just after one course, I could feel the weight of the car in every turn, on every surface, through the grass, the shoulders, and when bumping into the competition. The sense of weight was rendered through the driving experience, and quite frankly, it created a really fantastic feel that whipped the cars in GT2. Because of that I could attain a better sense of how to drive the car. I mean, the sense of control I that I felt over the cars is so much greater than in any other racing game I've played it was remarkable. I felt like I really was driving a rally-racing car.

So, in addition to the better balanced sense of weight in the cars, GT3 Producer Kazunori Yamauchi also has paid a lot of attention to what makes rally racing fun: powerslides, torque, and subtle control. The powerslides can indeed be handled like they should be, with a little preparation and little use of brakes. The car I drove had a decent sense of torque, but I suspect that they are probably faster cars to take on. And the control was there, I mean, it was top-notch stuff.

What you may have noticed in the first GT3 rally shots, besides the great car design and beautiful courses, are the dirt effects. They really look like the screenshots in the game. Those weren't phonies, no sir. Before, in GT2, when your car hit the dirt, the trail of smoke that fanned out was a series of mostly circular sprites that resembled so many 16-bit enemy centipede bosses. Well, that's just all gone. The dirt clouds that plume from the car don't just appear from its back, they appear from the front and the back tires, a realistic effect, and the smoke is an unusual effect that I don't think I've seen before on the PS2. The trail of flying dirt literally clouds up in air and looks incredibly real. Yeah, it sounds funny that I'm going on and on about a cloud of dirt, but you know what? It was frickin' cool looking. You know, this game is so amazingly beautiful in so many ways, it's easy to simply talk about the little things with great detail. Yamauchi and his team have paid such painstakingly close attention to all the details, it's just stunning to watch them all. What's more, they're subtle, not overt details. Things like dirt clouds, smoke, heat waves, and rain usually don't take up that much of writers' initial impressions, but here, the whole damn game is coated in brilliant little effects.

One last effect that was quite noticeable -- the shoulders of the courses were also packed with startling little tibits of coolness. On one particular turn, you could see individually rendered blades of grass that moved when you hit them. If you have ever seen Soul Calibur, you may recognize the slightly funny blades of grass that I speak of there. Well, these blades of grass ARE EVEN BETTER THAN THAT. WOAH! IMPRESSIVE BLADES OF FRICKIN' GRASS!

Ah, the amazing power of GT3. Well, there isn't much more to discuss, seeing as how I could only play one car and one track. But I'm sure that if you stopped me on the street, you'd get trapped into listening to me ramble on about how frickin' incredible this game is. The good thing is that the rally racing is finally good, perhaps even great. It's really evolved, and I'm pretty damn excited about it now. Of course, the game isn't finished yet, so it could change even more. Could it get better? Hmm... We'll have more in the upcoming days on GT3. Bet the ranch on it.